I just got off a somewhat contentious conference call with Hillary Clinton surrogates for New York reporters , who proved somewhat resistant to the pro-Hillary Clinton message coming from Chuck Schumer.

Referring to her primary win in New York yesterday, Schumer told reporters, “This was all Hillary. There was no big party machine in operation. There was no, you know, kind of things like that. It was Hillary.”

I asked him to explain that, given that virtually the entire party establishment was in her corner.

“Well, the political establishment is with her, but I am saying, when I ran my race in ‘98, and when Hillary ran her race in 2000, there was a huge get-out-the-vote operation with thousands and thousands of people and phone calls and everything else. I don’t think Hillary needed that in New York and results proved it.”

Liz Benjamin pointed out that the unions were phone-banking for her.

“Look, I’m not saying they weren’t,” Schumer said. “I am saying that compared to get-out-the-vote operations in closely contested elections, and particularly with new candidates, this was not, you know, it was not that kind of operation. It didn’t have to be.”

Newsday’s John Riley asked Schumer why he thought Barack Obama did so much better in his home-state of Illinois than Clinton did in New York.

Campaign spokesman Blake Zeff intercepted the question, offering the explanation afterwards that New York is much bigger than Illinois and they didn’t campaign there with the same intensity that the Obama people did here.

Also, there was this, from Jerry Nadler: “I think last night really stopped what was building up to be a very strong Obama momentum. It seems to me at least that a lot of what he said is awfully vacuous. There isn’t much there.”